Land Of The Blind

'No,' she says. 'Something happen to Pete?'

'I don't know yet.'

The girl thinks about it for a moment and relaxes. 'I wouldn't mind if somebody finally killed that fucker. He steals everything.'

'Will you show me his door? I won't tell him that you did.'

The girl shrugs again. 'If he ain't dead, I wouldn't want to be the one to wake him up. He got a fuckin' temper, him.'

'Oh, I'll be gentle,' Caroline says. She follows the girl back up the stairs, into the fourth-floor landing. The girl points at a door and nods solemnly. Caroline nods back and hands the girl her tea, then waits for her to make her way quietly down the stairs.

When she hears the girl's door ease closed two floors below, Caroline smells around the door. It stinks, but she isn't sure if it's that stink. Caroline puts her ear to the door. Nothing. She knocks on the door to Pete Decker's apartment. She rests one hand on the nine-millimeter in her shoulder harness, and with the other reaches for the doorknob. She is surprised when the knob turns and the door opens, and she finds herself staring at an even younger girl, about sixteen, wearing nothing but a flannel shirt.

'Hi,' the girl says cheerily.

'Don't answer the fuckin' door,' says someone, presumably Pete, who is also presumably alive, in a tangle of blankets on a mattress on the floor. Caroline steps in, past the girl. The apartment consists of this one room, about twelve feet by twelve feet, nothing inside but the mattress and a new thirty-two-inch color television across from it. The walls are chipped and covered with shit and there are bags of chips and cookies all over. There are six people along the walls of the room, boys and girls, teenagers, and they all have the blank eyes and cat-box smell of heavy meth users.

She recognizes Pete from his mug shot. Alone on the mattress, he sits up, pissed off and bare chested. 'What the fuck time is it?' Pete stands and he is naked, as skinny as the teenagers in the room – a bantam rooster, hard and small. Quarter-size bruises cover his body. 'Don't answer the fuckin' door unless I tell you to!' Pete yells again, and he shoves the sixteen-year-old girl, who looks like an empty flannel shirt as she flies across the room.

Caroline steps toward him, inside the range of his fists. She grabs him by the throat just as he swings at her. She deflects most of the punch, and catches the rest in the neck; she is taller than he expected, and not as easy to move. This is a guy used to hitting down at his women. Caroline gathers herself, tightens her grip on his neck and swings her knee up into his balls. He grunts and slumps, and she pushes him back down on the mattress. He rolls over onto his side, moaning.

'You must be Pete,' Caroline says, and shows her badge. She picks up Pete's jeans, feels in them for a weapon, and comes away with a long pocket-knife that she slides into her own pocket.

'Anybody in here eighteen?' she asks the owl-eyed teenagers. 'Yeah, I didn't think so. You've all got twenty seconds to get your clothes and get out of here. And if I ever see any of you in here again, you're going to jail.'

As Caroline continues to look for weapons, the teenagers scramble into their shirts and shoes, grab their bags of Doritos, and hurry out the door. Only the flannel girl is left. She pulls on a pair of pants and wipes her bloody lip with a white T-shirt. 'Where do I go?'

'You his girlfriend?'

'Yeah.'

'How old?'

The girl considers lying. 'I'm sixteen,' she says finally.

Caroline gives her two dollars. 'Go to the coffee shop across the street and get yourself a cup of hot chocolate. I'll be over in a minute.' The girl leaves and Caroline turns back to Pete, who makes no move to cover himself or his sore testicles.

'Bitch.'

I could shoot him, Caroline thinks, and she immediately thinks about investigating her own crime: the trail of witnesses, the barrista, the teenagers, the father with the blond son, the girl who showed Caroline the door; Caroline's handprint on Pete's neck, the police slug in his chest. Maybe she'd confess, ask for three legal pads and some coffee and sit down next to Clark the Loon, drawing a line between all the events in her life and this one crime.

'Pete,' she says, 'you should get some friends your own age.'

'Fuck you.'

'You're a lucky man, Pete. I'm not gonna arrest you today.'

Finally he pulls the dirty blanket over himself. Caroline walks to the window and looks down on the street. She sees the young flannel girl cross the street, swing around a parking meter, and go into the coffee shop. Caroline turns back to Pete.

'I need some information about a guy named Clark. You know him?'

'No.'

Pete Decker is used to having cops ask if he knows someone. 'Come on. Think. Clark something. About my age. Mid to late thirties. Dark hair. Good looking. Little over six feet tall. Has an eye patch.'

With that last bit of information, Pete Decker sits up in bed and smiles. 'Clark? No way. How is he?'

'He's okay. So you do know him?'

'Sure, we was like… best friends when we were kids. You know, little kids. Rode bikes and shit. Before-' He doesn't say before what.

'You know his last name?' she asks.

'Clark? Oh, fuck. Sure. You know. Clark… uh… starts with an M. I used to know it. You know, when we were kids. So how is Clark, man? Still the same?'

Not knowing what he was like before, Caroline isn't sure how to answer.

'Man, I haven't seen Clark in… fuck, years.'

'You don't keep in touch with him?'

'Clark? Nah, man.' He looks around the one-room apartment. 'Yeah, I don't keep in touch with too many people from the old neighborhood, you know.'

'Clark have a beef with anyone, someone he might have wanted to hurt?'

'Clark? Nah,' he says. 'No, everybody liked Clark. He's funny. Smart as shit too. Get all A's and shit. I used to tell him, 'Clark, don't worry about your ol' buddy Pete. You go make something of yourself. Ol' Pete, he'll be fine.' You know why? I used to kind of protect him from bullies 'n' shit. We was tight.'

Pete sits up in bed. 'Yeah, Clark, he was the kind of guy you always knew would be okay. Played sports and banged all them cheerleaders, even with…' He raises his hand absentmindedly to his own left eye. '… You know, the accident and shit.'

'Yeah, his eye. How'd that happen?'

'Oh.' Pete looks around nervously, as if he's wondering about the statute of limitations. 'Some kind of accident. You know. Kids.'

'When did you see Clark last?'

'Huh.' Pete thinks. It does not appear to be his strong suit. 'Oh. Probably 1979. Yeah. Probably then.'

Caroline nods. She's not sure whether to be upset that this has turned out to be nothing, or glad that Clark whose-last-name-starts-with-an-M the Loon told the truth when he said Pete Decker was nobody.

'Okay, Pete,' she says, and she crouches in front of him. 'In just the last ten minutes, you've committed six felonies. I'm gonna give you a break, but I need you to do some things for me. Four things. Can you do four things for me, Pete?'

'Sure.' He sits up, all sunken cheeks and vacant eyes, and she knows he will do nothing, that twenty minutes after she leaves, the teenagers will be back and they will all be smoking crystal and watching Pete's stolen TV. 'Anything,' he says.

She pulls out her notebook and writes, 1. GIRL. 'That girl,' she says. 'The one you hit. Never see her again. You understand? Send her home to her parents.'

'Yeah,' he says.

2. TV, she writes. 'This morning, you take this TV back where you stole it from.'